Herb Sutter on software, hardware, and concurrency

Archive for May, 2011

As promised, reminder: The followup interview on Channel 9 has been scheduled, and will be shot on Thursday, June 2. You have until midnight June 1 (North American Pacific time) to post new questions, and to vote others’ questions up/down.

Lloyd Moore of NWCPP did record some video and post slides of my C++ lambdas talk two days ago. The video and slides (PDF) are now online. You can see Lloyd’s friendly smile in the foreground of the final frame.

The room lighting and layout weren’t great for video recording, but the audio is quite clear and you can refer to the PDF to see everything on the slides in detail.

So here’s my idea: Let’s do another C9 interview, this time with your questions — hard or soft, big or small, just not too bizarre or personal please. :)

Here’s how I’ll try to take them:

Post your question(s) below as a reply to this post. Post as many questions as you like, but please make each one a separate reply for better clarity.

Return often to vote your and others’ questions up or down. That way I know what’s of interest to lots of people, rather than spending 10% of the interview answering something of interest to only one person.

Charles will pepper me with the top-rated questions and we’ll get through as many as we can in some reasonable time (30 minutes? though once we get going we tend to be hard to stop). We’ll try to do it somewhere with a whiteboard as I expect that’ll be handy.

So, now it’s all yours… reply below as often as you like, and vote the questions up/down early and often.

Update, June 7: The followup interview is now live. Thanks for all your questions, and we took as many of the most popular ones as we could!

Channel 9 just posted a new interview with me about ISO C++0x, C++’s place in the modern world, and all things C++. The topics we talked about ranged pretty widely, as you can see from the questions below.

Here’s the blurb as posted on Channel 9 with links to specific questions in the interview. Enjoy.

As usual when talking to Herb, the conversation is all about C++ (well, we do talk about C# for a little while, but in the context of C++. Why? Tune in…).

See below for the specific questions that were asked. You can simply click on a link to move directly to that point in the conversation. I do, however, strongly recommend that you watch the entire thing. I also recommend that you don’t get used to this level of categorization in my videos (it takes a fair amount of time to do this sort of thing, so enjoy the times when I actually do this, but don’t expect me to do this all of the time).

It’s always great to talk to Herb and get a glimpse of what goes on in the C++ Standards Committee (which Herb chairs). In this specific conversation, it’s uplifting to see how excited Herb is for the future of one of the world’s most capable and widely used general purpose programming languages. C++ is a modern programming language for power and performance, but it’s also a highly abstracted general purpose language for building user mode applications, mobile apps, etc. The amazing part is how C++ can provide rich general programming abstractions and also ensure that your code can run at machine speeds. We talk about this, of course.